Last Wednesday we went along to a talk by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine in the US, who was in town as part of the excellent Festival of Ideas. Over the course of an hour he spoke about the ideas behind his two books, The Long Tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited demand and the recently-published Free: the future of a radical price: the economics of abundance and why zero pricing is changing the face of business.
Over the past couple of months we've also attended talks by Alain de Botton (the pleasures and sorrows of work) and Susie Orbach (bodies) as part of the festival and on every occasion so far, much as the speaking part has always been interesting, things really seem to get going when the audience put forward their questions: a teacher at a college spoke revealingly about the superficial nature of her female students; a woman seemed to temporarily disarm Alain de Botton with her views on housework; and last week Chris Anderson, in response to a question, made me think when talking about how quality depends on relevance. Thankfully, it's been nothing like my sixth form college lectures where, when thrown open to the floor, heads everywhere looked down and everyone nervously shuffled down in their seats...
The festival has been running since 2005 and originally formed part of Bristol's bid to become 2008 Capital of Culture. The bid failed but the festival went ahead anyway and will continue into next year when the theme will be Science and Technology.
4 comments:
Starting to look around for more speaking events myself. Have you heard of TED or Barcamp (Google them if not)? There's some pretty fascinating stuff going around.
By the way, I see that the tinkering with the look of your blog goes on! Liking the typeface-only look at the moment, though you do always have some interesting images up as well - don't miss that style out completely!
Never knew Anderson was associated with Wired, one of those weird coincidences, was only reading the blurb of the Free book at work today!
@Globalism: thanks for the suggestions - been [very] slowly working my way through TED (particularly enjoyed Scott McCloud on comics (http://tinyurl.com/n2zx3e) & Ken Robinson on how the education system is killing creativity (http://tinyurl.com/mluw5k)) but will be sure to check out Barcamp.
Design tinkering is ongoing - have always stuck with Blogger because you're free to mess around with stuff. We've gone a bit Habitat here with the use of DIN... but yeah, it'll probably change again tomorrow...
@Lil' Pete: I didn't know either actually until I was pointed to the Ideas Festival website.
Explanation of the Long Tail (scroll down):
http://tinyurl.com/lj4hzz
Basis for Chris Anderson's talk:
http://tinyurl.com/2se78c
You can download a free audioversion of Free here:
http://tinyurl.com/kp8el2
@Globalism: oh, & don't forget the Do Lectures: http://thedolectures.com/
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